Welcome to the Wormverse
by OnConditionOfAnonymity
Summary: When you're trying to save the world and someone shows up with knowledge of the future, what do you say to them? Probably not this, unless you're Contessa.


You are here to change the course of history. You think that because you know the future you can make things better. Save the world earlier, with fewer casualties. You're wrong.

Your advantage is that you can act on information nobody else can. You know things I don't, that's true. But I can act on information _whether or not_ I know it. And right now, I am acting on a path to ensure that the next few decades will have as many survivors as possible. My power might not tell me more than one step at a time—and I'd like to talk to some of you about what the path ends up looking like—but I do trust it to give me the result I ask for. If you have powers you can be useful as an additional parahuman, but your extra knowledge _cannot_ lead to a plan that saves more people, because my Path to Victory has already taken every fact in the world into account.

That's not to say you're useless! Your information might help with other goals. Since my Path is not telling me to incapacitate you, you must not be going to _decrease_ the total number of lives saved from the apocalypse. So feel free to use your knowledge to help people in other ways, or even just to make your own lives easier. If you want to take down some villains in a way that doesn't interfere with my Path to Victory, go right ahead. Of course I offer no guarantee that I won't stop your plan if it _does_.

So far we have five self-inserts who really should know all this already, eight extra Weavers, two Clockblockers, a Kid Win and an Aegis, one each of Legend, Emily Piggot, Bonesaw, and Coil, Phir Se and miscellaneous other Tinkers, a Tattletale and a half, one of me, and a very confused Blake. Where did they come from? Spacebattles, mostly. All of them have knowledge of the future either through time travel or from reading a particular book, or something along those lines.

There are of course some things I can't see. Scion. Eidolon. You. I've heard from one of the Weavers that my Path will involve the Endbringers joining us against Scion. I wouldn't be able to see or predict that directly—but my Path brought it about anyway. So if you're from a different enough multiverse that you're immune to my ability, don't underestimate me. If Eidolon drops a ball, do you think I can't catch it blindfolded? The same applies to everything you do. _If the effects of your actions would be an improvement, my Path would already be telling me to do it myself._ And I may not be able to see a path to "Scion stops killing people," but I have one to "apocalyptic death rates stop and humanity recovers." So work with me, not against me.

Cauldron has some of the best Thinkers available, and we know that most of the human race is going to die. We are doing our best to mitigate that, and by "best" I mean "it is by definition the result with the most survivors unless my power is lying." So stay out of the way of my plan, or I will stop you. Unfortunately, this means do not interfere with what you know as the plot. If you have any bright ideas about how to save even more of the human race, I can tell you right now that they will not work.

Unless you think you have a better plan than me?

AN:  
>This was inspired by reading Security! by ack1308, who in addition to writing a very good story knows canon better than I do. But I do think he and a bunch of other authors missed this one. :P<p>

I like the genre of protagonist-who-knows-the-plot, but Worm seems exceptionally badly suited to it. Any time a character helps Amy with her psychological issues or kills Jack Slash, they are ensuring that the story we saw in canon will no longer happen the same way. If that were an improvement, Contessa's Path would have told her to do it in the first place. (We don't actually read what her plan is leading toward; here I said fewest deaths. This problem applies regardless as long as at some point Doctor Mother thought to ask her for a goal containing a superlative and didn't just leave it at "at least some humans survive.")

AN 2:  
>Anyone who sends me an explanation of why a Peggy Sue or a self-insert <em>can<em> do better than Contessa will get a response with a counterargument (if lets me send one, that is). If you convince me I'm wrong, I'll edit this to give you your due eternal glory.

AN 3:  
>So far, the only winning answer is from Stripes, who points out that in canon Contessa's path wasn't to saving the most people; it was a path to getting the most powerful army possible. It's true that this is the last path we see Fortuna calculate in her interlude. She was just the wrong girl asking the wrong questions in the wrong time.<br>But Doctor Mother _wasn't_. Unless she had an Idiot Ball welded to her head for decades she should have thought to ask Contessa for a result that actually involves _winning_ instead of just fighting. But it does mean that an SI can save more lives than Contessa (if only because she might not have been trying) so: Eternal glory.

Also I edited in a paragraph about her power's blind spots. Several reviewers argued that she can't see Eidolon/Endbringers/Self-Inserts. But her Path can take the effects of their actions into account, so as long as her goal doesn't refer directly to a blind spot this shouldn't matter.


End file.
